09/11/2026
From our executive director, Michael Aaron: "There is a whole generation alive today that has no idea what the world was like on September 10, 2001.
It was a different world. We traveled differently. Airports were different. Security was different. The way Americans thought about terrorism and our own sense of safety was different.
Then came the morning of September 11, 2001.
I was 21 years old and working for Northwest Airlines at the ticket counter.
We had just finished working our morning Minneapolis flight. Things had slowed down at the ticket counter when a coworker came up to me and said, “Did you hear about the airplane that crashed into the World Trade Center?”
My first thought was that it had to have been a small airplane — maybe a Cessna that had gotten lost in the fog or had some kind of accident. I could not imagine that an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center.
I went back to the employee break room behind the ticket counter to see what was happening on television.
Just as I got back there, I watched the second airplane hit the World Trade Center live.
At that point, we knew something was terribly wrong.
I remember immediately calling my mother to tell her I loved her. None of us really knew what was happening or what might happen next.
Then the entire U.S. airline system began shutting down.
The airplanes that were already in the air had to land. We had roughly 15 Northwest flights come in, and suddenly we were trying to get all of those passengers off the airplanes and into the terminal.
Nobody knew how long the shutdown was going to last.
People started looking for rental cars, buses, rides from family or friends — whatever they could find. Passengers who had expected to make a connection or fly somewhere else that day were suddenly trying to figure out how to get home on the ground.
Eventually, the airport emptied out.
I had never seen anything like it. An airport that was normally full of people, announcements, airplanes arriving and departing suddenly became almost completely quiet.
And the shutdown did not last a few hours.
It lasted for days.
The next day I came back to the airport and saw something else I had never seen in my life.
Military personnel were patrolling the airport carrying assault ri**es.
I remember looking around and thinking that this was the kind of scene I had only seen on television — somewhere like Beirut, not Columbus, Ohio.
That was when it really hit me how much had changed in such a short period of time.
In the days afterward, we began learning the full extent of what had happened.
Then the airline layoffs started.
Thousands upon thousands of employees were being laid off across the industry — thousands at one airline, thousands at another. The airline business changed almost overnight.
September 11 changed aviation. It changed airport security. It changed travel. It changed American foreign policy and led to years of war. It changed careers, families and lives.
For younger people today, much of what came after September 11 is simply normal. They have never known anything else.
But I remember September 10, 2001.
And I remember being 21 years old working for Northwest Airlines the next morning when everything changed.
Twenty-five years later, I still remember exactly where I was and what happened that day.
I will never forget. Remembering those who lost their lives that day and in the years after due to environmental factors. Prayers for the loved ones who were left to grieve. Prayers. "
